Peloton, the spinning startup making waves in New York City, is on a roll. To date, the company has raised over $119 million in venture capital and seen a fivefold increase in membership each year since it was founded in 2012.
The company sets itself apart from other like-minded spinning startups by honing in on the at-home experience, which is at the core of its product offerings.
This unique approach is backed by the company’s in-house design team, led by Becca Eley, Peloton's Director of Design. We caught up with Eley to discuss how the company’s design projects shape the brand, and what it’s really like to be a designer at Peloton.
Built In: What does a typical day on the design team look like?
Becca Eley: For me, it’s more about checking in with everyone and seeing how their projects are going. For junior designers, they’re working on the day-to-day projects for everything we put out. For higher level designers, they’re focused on everything from the website to scheduling photo shoots that feature the product to packaging for products.
BI: How do you interact with other teams within the company?
BE: We have multiple design teams and as a brand we want to put forth a cohesive look in general, so we do a lot of checkins to make sure we all have a matching voice. More specifically, our team focuses on how the brand lives across our marketing platforms.
BI: Team traditions? What is unique about working on the design team at Peloton?
BE: Culturally, we try to steer clear of doing anything repetitive. We’ll do things like a welcome lunch for every new employee, but we try to keep mixing that up. Whatever we do it has to inspire us in how we grow, but we try to keep it non-ritualized. We want to keep people coming to our company and keep people interested in working here.
BI: What qualities are you looking for in a designer?
BE: As a startup, we have to have proactive designers. Whether it's building out our UI to make our systems clearer and faster, we want our employees to be extremely versatile.
BI: What sort of projects is your team working on right now?
BE: The biggest thing we’re doing right now is working on our homepage and how we’re talking about the bike. As a company, we made a bike that allows you to enjoy fitness classes from the comfort of your home. That’s a very simple message, but it’s so important to us in how it affects product. And conveying that message in as few words and images as possible has been a major challenge. Yes we’re a tech company and yes we’re a product design company, but ultimately, we want our customers to know that we’re going to deliver them a piece of fitness equipment that’s going to change the way they workout on a day-to-day basis. That’s one of our biggest challenges moving forward — conveying that message across our website, but also across every single touchpoint of the business.
BI: What have you learned in leading the design team at Peloton?
BE: I worked with a lot of other startups before this. The cool thing about being in-house is you can make the brand very localized —those day-to-day things, which are just as important as the big picture things, can get the care and attention they deserve. With that, you really get to influence a brand at a grassroots level, which is really cool.
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